The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Over the course of time, various devices in a network generate events that indicate the current condition of the devices. For example, if a link between a router and a device goes down, an event is generated indicating that the link is down. Filtering events, correlating events, and using rules to analyze the events are approaches that have been used in the past for analyzing events to provide meaningful information to network managers or management systems. An example of filtering events is consolidating several events of the same type into one event. An example of correlating events is correlating that one failure is related to another failure. For example, if one router goes down it may generate a first event and may cause other routers also to generate events, which are correlated back to the first event. An example of using rules to analyze events is performing statistical analysis on the events.
However, there are numerous problems associated with these past approaches. One problem is using one approach to solve the problems that should be addressed by another approach. For example, filtering may be inappropriately used to achieve correlation between events, or performing rules to analyze events may be inappropriately used while filtering events. Another problem with these past approaches is that one network management system may not be able to provide information to another network management system.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for processing events to maintain status in a way that allows one network management system to provide information to another network management system.
Furthermore, there is a need for processing events to maintain status without using one approach to solve the problems that should be addressed by another approach.